Shocker: Obama to give America back to Indians

A secret U.N. plot revealed: First, they'll take Manhattan

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Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient Joseph Medicine Crow shows a drum to President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama during a reception for recipients and their families in the Blue Room of the White House, August 12, 2009. (Official White House photo by Pete Souza)
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Earlier this month, Obama said the U.S. would support the U.N.’s “Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People,” a non-legally binding promise to finally treat indigenous peoples with some small amount of decency after hundreds of years of the government murdering them and expelling them from their homes and forcibly relocating them to barren desert ghettos and now just letting them live in conditions of appalling, abject poverty. Bush refused to sign on to this, because, I dunno, it was from the U.N., and it might lead to frivolous lawsuits, or something? It’s a non-binding Declaration that basically says “we will be nice to indigenous people,” there’s no good reason not to support it.

But because hysterical right-wingers are hysterical right-wingers, they are seizing on this document as yet more proof that Obama wants to forcibly redistribute all the wealth, from productive hard-working Real Americans to swarthy welfare leeches. Take it away, World Net Daily!

President Obama is voicing support for a U.N. resolution that could accomplish something as radical as relinquishing some U.S. sovereignty and opening a path for the return of ancient tribal lands to American Indians, including even parts of Manhattan.

The issue is causing alarm among legal experts.

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Oh, I bet it is. WND-founder Joseph Farah has a little column where he repeats this insane story, but then he quotes some egg-head professor who says that all the tribes want is some “open lands/spaces for repurchase,” which doesn’t really sound like “giving back” Manhattan to the Native Americans.

I say if you’re gonna do it, do it right and actually give New York back to the Delaware Indians! I’d rather be ruled by them than by Bloomberg and Albany.

(Also why don’t Scalia-style Constitutional originalists ever insist that America honor its various broken treaties with all the Indians whose lands we stole as we systematically removed and massacred them? I know that would entail giving them back the entirety of Oklahoma, among lots of other amusing things, but the supremacy of treaties is in the damn Constitution! Although I guess Article Six, with its federal supremacy clause and its no religious test talk, has always been the article that right-wingers are not particularly enthusiastic about.)

Correction: This article originally stated that WND founder Joseph Farah repeated the phrase “Carter era” in his incredibly silly column. That is incorrect. It was the incredibly silly “news story” on his incredibly silly website that repeated that phrase, even though the story has nothing at all to do with Jimmy Carter. I apologize for the error.

Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene